I Didn't Vote for Obama Today

I Didn't Vote For Obama Today
November 4, 2008, 9:37AM

I have a confession to make.

I did not vote for Barack Obama today.

I've openly supported Obama since March. But I didn't vote for him today.

I wanted to vote for Ronald Woods. He was my algebra teacher at Clark Junior High in East St. Louis, IL. He died 15 years ago when his truck skidded head-first into a utility pole. He spent many a day teaching us many things besides the Pythagorean Theorem. He taught us about Medgar Evers, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis and many other civil rights figures who get lost in the shadow cast by Martin Luther King, Jr.

But I didn't vote for Mr. Woods.

I wanted to vote for Willie Mae Cross. She owned and operated Crossroads Preparatory Academy for almost 30 years, educating and empowering thousands of kids before her death in 2003. I was her first student. She gave me my first job, teaching chess and math concepts to kids in grades K-4 in her summer program. She was always there for advice, cheer and consolation. Ms. Cross, in her own way, taught me more about walking in faith than anyone else I ever knew.

But I didn't vote for Ms. Cross.

I wanted to vote for Arthur Mells Jackson, Sr. and Jr. Jackson Senior was a Latin professor. He has a gifted school named for him in my hometown. Jackson Junior was the pre-eminent physician in my hometown for over 30 years. He has a heliport named for him at a hospital in my hometown. They were my great-grandfather and great-uncle, respectively.

But I didn't vote for Prof. Jackson or Dr. Jackson.

I wanted to vote for A.B. Palmer. She was a leading civil rights figure in Shreveport, Louisiana, where my mother grew up and where I still have dozens of family members. She was a strong-willed woman who earned the grudging respect of the town's leaders because she never, ever backed down from anyone and always gave better than she got. She lived to the ripe old age of 99, and has a community center named for her in Shreveport.

But I didn't vote for Mrs. Palmer.

I wanted to vote for these people, who did not live to see a day where a Black man would appear on their ballots on a crisp November morning.

In the end, though, I realized that I could not vote for them any more than I could vote for Obama himself.

So who did I vote for?

No one.

I didn't vote. Not for President, anyway.

Oh, I went to the voting booth. I signed, was given my stub, and was walked over to a voting machine. I cast votes for statewide races and a state referendum on water and sewer improvements.

I stood there, and I thought about all of these people, who influenced my life so greatly. But I didn't vote for who would be the 44th President of the United States.

When my ballot was complete, except for the top line, I finally decided who I was going to vote for - and then decided to let him vote for me. I reached down, picked him up, and told him to find Obama's name on the screen and touch it.

And so it came to pass that Alexander Reed, age 5, read the voting screen, found the right candidate, touched his name, and actually cast a vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Oh, the vote will be recorded as mine. But I didn't cast it.

Then again, the person who actually pressed the Obama box and the red "vote" button was the person I was really voting for all along.

It made the months of donating, phonebanking, canvassing, door hanger distributing, sign posting, blogging, arguing and persuading so much sweeter.

So, no, I didn't vote for Barack Obama. I voted for a boy who now has every reason to believe he, too, can grow up to be anything he wants...even President.

A good read from this blog, HERE.

King of the Hill

One of the best TV shows, past and present, will be coming to an end as of next year. King of the Hill, an animated television show on FOX, is scheduled to stop airing due to other projects that the writers of the show are pursuing.

It's a very funny series chronicling the life of a fictional family in a fictional city in Texas. Unlike other animated shows where they try to create unrealistic plots, King of the Hill is basically a regular day-in-the-life of a family, but as a cartoon. I loved the wacky, dry humor that made each episode funny. Phrases like "Damn it Bobby!" and "I sell propane, and propane accessories" are classic, at least for those familiar to the show.

And despite me not owning a TV set, I am still bummed at the cancellation and demise of such a cool show. Hopefully something equally interesting takes its place.

I was checking on the total number of miles that I've accumulated with my Hawaiian Airlines card, just in case I want to make a dash over to a slice of heaven, i.e. the Hawaiian islands, and I came across this paragraph. Please note the highlighted part:

Hawaiian Airlines is not responsible for and reserves the right to suspend or cancel the HawaiianMiles program in the event of war, acts of God or public enemy, fire, flood, hurricanes, strikes or other labor disputes, riots, insurrection, governmental orders or actions, beyond the control of Hawaiian, or in the event of bankruptcy, reorganization or merger.

WTF? What does THAT actually mean? Initially I thought they were referring to natural disasters, but they've already got that covered in the sentence. So now I'm a bit bewildered as to what type of act God can do to cancel my trip to heaven. Seems a bit ironic, if you ask me.

The Credit Crisis Explained as an Arctic Expedition

The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition from Marketplace on Vimeo.

This is actually very informative and highlights some pretty interesting and sometimes complex things into a straight forward analogy. It's narrated by Paddy Hirsch, the senior editor of Marketplace at American Public Media.

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

I found this book through either amazon or audible's recommendation or because people who had read another book that I read, don't remember which, also recommended this one. The whole time I was reading this book two words kept coming into my head, "chick flick," but in this case it would be "chick book." Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad book, but there were times when I was cringing at some of the cheesy, gushy details the author, Anita Amirrezvani, was describing throughout the story. Details that seemed to be written specifically for women in mind, since the whole plot centers around the coming of age of a 14-year-old Persian girl in 17th Century Iran. She's supposed to marry within the year but her father dies suddenly and she and her mother are forced to leave their small village to seek help from her uncle, who lives in a distant major city. A lot of the plot was in large part due to her naivety of coming from a small village to "the big-bad-city," which in all honesty made the story seem very cheap and contrived. She endures befriending a rich girl, then losing her friendship, and getting married, but then losing the guy to her friend. She basically ended up with about a years worth of bad luck due to some comet that had been seen by a mystic from her village at the beginning of the story.

The reason I finished it, other than the fact that I don't like starting things and not finishing them, was that the story also had a sub plot that was of interest to me: rug making. She was skilled as an rug maker but when she came to the city with her mom to her uncles she ended up learning so much more due to the fact that he happened to be the rug maker for the Shaw, the ruler of Iran. Being as the uncle didn't have a son to pass on the knowledge and family business to, he entrusted her with his wisdom and experience. It was barely enough for me to feign interest in the story, and they weren't really that great.

Would I recommend this book? If you've never read a coming-of-age story then yes, by all means read this book. The author does a pretty good job of describing the protagonist and the intricacies of her life and the world as it was seen in Iran at the time, and then weaving (pun intended) them into a respectable story. But steer clear if you're looking for some deep, eye-opening, philosophical meaning behind yet another coming-of-age story. This is not that book.

One thump up.

In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

There is more to life than increasing its speed. (Ghandi)

Tell that to the modern world! Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, the modern world seems to be telling you to move faster, faster, faster! Magazine covers advertise how to achieve "30 second orgasms!" or how to "Loose your gut in 3 days!" Nowadays it's not uncommon to find someone driving, emailing/texting, and eating all at once. It seems as if the cool leisurely stroll we were doing on the treadmill of life has all of a sudden been warped into hyperdrive, and all we can do from falling on our buh-dunk-kuh-dunks is hold on and keep moving faster, faster, faster!

I was inspired to read Carl Honore's book after seeing the TED lecture, and though the gist of the book and the lecture are similar he goes into a bit more detail in the book regarding the Slow Movement, which is his central theme. The Slow Movement is just that, doing things at a slower pace than what has been mandated by the modern world. Things such as eating, sex, medicine, leisure, the mind/body, work, building cities, and raising children each have a Slow Movement associated with them. Despite not going into too much detail regarding any of those subjects, he still gives a base for most people to start from. Can't let the guy do ALL the work. ;-)

This is a great book for those that are questioning their slave-like attachment to time and the modern worlds incessant pursuit of the mantra that "faster is better." Unfortunately, or should I say fortunately, that is not the case. In the West our relationship with time is very linear, meaning we think that time has a beginning and an end and thus must use up as much of it as possible before it ends for us. Hence our desire and need to fill it up with as many appointments, tasks, to-do lists, adventures, nights-out, sexual partners, etc. as possible to "better make use of our time." This thinking then implies that not doing anything equals to not being productive or even worse, wasting time! But that is furthest from the truth. There is a great point in the book that pretty much sums it up. It's a quote from Dean Harry Lewis of the undergraduate school at Harvard who wrote an email and dispenses it to every incoming freshman class. He wrote, "Empty time is not a vacuum. It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively arranged, like the empty square in the 4 x 4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around." I thought that pretty much hit the nail on the head. You need space to breathe and time to be able to look around and enjoy what you have. The Slow Movement is not saying that everything should be slow, but that there is a time for doing things fast and a time for doing things slow, as well as in between. The modern world has set everyones default speed at fast and he is just making a case to reassess what your priorities are in life and not let the temptation of getting things done faster in order to do more stuff blind you from what is truly important: the enjoyment of life at your own pace.


Two thumbs up!

The Slow Movement

This is from TED:

Canadian-born journalist Carl Honore has written for The Economist, the Houston Chronicle, the Observer, and the National Post, but he is best known for his advocacy of the Slow Movement. A loose and international effort by the harried and haggard to decelerate the pace of their lives, the Slow Movement spans everything from telecommunications (slow email) and health care (slow medicine) to diet (slow food) and public space (slow cities).

Honore's bestselling book In Praise of Slowness plots the lineage of our speed-obsessed society; while it recognizes the difficulty of slowing down, it also highlights the successes of everyday people around the world who have found ways of doing it. Honoré traces his "Aha" moment to his son's bedtime, when Honore would race through storybooks -- skipping pages, reading portions of paragraphs -- to move things along. (He's since reformed.) His next book, Under Pressure, is about how we are raising a generation of overprogrammed, overachieving and exhausted children.